Last week we shared an appreciation of Joe Brainard by Matthew Burgess. This week we’re posting an essay on Brainard by T&W artist David Andrew Stoler.

Joe Brainard’s book-length poem I Remember has something of a cult following here at T&W. Nearly every one of us has taught an I Remember lesson using Brainard’s work at one time or another. The poem’s spontaneity, playfulness, frankness, generous spirit, and unassuming tone have made fans of readers, writers, and teachers since its publication in the 70s. The publication this year of The Collected Works of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett (Library of America) prompted us to revisit I Remember in the winter issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine, where we take a new look at the qualities that have encouraged teaching artists across the country to turn to the work again and again.

Like a Key to the Writer’s Mind 
by David Andrew Stoler 

The first few times we saw each other the best we could do was cast wary glances at one another across the busy halls of the college, like people who met at a party long ago. We recognized each other—vaguely—but that was all.

And then one day the elevator door opened, everybody got out, she got on, the door closed. We stood for a moment, staring at our shoes.

“What high school did you go to?” I said. I thought I knew her, but having taught thousands of students over the last decade, I just couldn’t be sure.

“Lincoln,” she said. Somewhere I had never been. I shrugged, and we returned to the intimate, awkward silence of strangers on an elevator.

Then she spoke: “I remember the pretty German girl who stank. You’re the poetry guy. I still have the anthology we made.”

Her name was Jasmine. She had been in the fifth grade when I had taught her at PS 156 in Brownsville, Brooklyn. It had been nearly a decade since, she was now a sophomore in college, and she remembered the very first lesson we had done together: Joe Brainard.

This has happened over and over since I started teaching I Remember poems in 2001—former students calling out lines to me as I walked down the halls to other classrooms, or down the sidewalk on my block. They’ve never yelled out anything else: not Whitman or Williams, not the Slam poets they loved so much. And they shout out specific lines: from a poem I read them once—I don’t even hand out copies!—when they didn’t know who I was, on our first day, a long time ago.

There’s just something about Joe Brainard. I was introduced to I Remember poems by the poet Lisa Jarnot in my own first poetry class—a class I signed up for skeptically—and the poem I wrote using the form was the rocket that led me to change my college major from physics to creative writing. The simplicity of it masks its true gift: when faced with a blank page, one “I remember” spawns another, like a key to the writer’s mind that opens the floodgates of the subconscious, gets the pen moving, makes the paralyzing self-awareness of the act disappear.

As a writer, whenever stuck, I Remember is where I return. In fiction, it is an incredibly successful way to get into characters’ minds—what do they remember—or to attack a difficult scene. But for a teacher, Brainard is even more useful. As an opening lesson, it is rife with humor, with titillation ( Joe B. must be edited for younger classes), and with experiences that students connect to immediately. A simple phrase—I remember laundromats at night all lit up with nobody in them—leads to lessons on image, details, and—writing’s reason to be—empathy. Students who are shy with their pencils are instantly connected to  their own memories—Well, I’ve also seen laundromats lit up at night…—and those two simple words make starting easy.

I’ve used Brainard a thousand times over, in a thousand different situations—to help young cancer survivors start approaching the trauma they’ve recently confronted; to help my sister write her speech for her daughter’s bat mitzvah; to help business students understand how they, too, are poets. And Joe Brainard has given a gift of the most rewarding kind for a veteran teacher who sometimes wonders if he’s ever really had any effect on any student at all: to know that he, too, long after leaving an elementary school in Brownsville’s halls, will also be remembered.

David Andrew Stoler, a T&W teaching artist, just completed his first film, Daadi.  Details at : https://www.facebook.com/DaadiTheMovie.

On this, the celebration of the publication of the anthology of your writing, I’d like to take a moment—before this descends into the cheeto-snorting, chair-throwing, chaos-fest it inevitably will—to make a toast. If you could all raise your wee plastic cups of the Jolt Cola and Red Bull that your parents thought appropriate to send along with you for this 8:30AM party, let us acknowledge that which has brought this magnificent piece of work into being:

To your school administrators: who, despite more and more urgent messages on their voice mails; notes to their secretaries; desperate emails in the middle of the night; text messages; letters delivered by US Mail, FedEx, UPS, and courier; faxes, telexes, and one telegram; failed to respond to even the most basic questions of class room assignment, scheduling, teacher absence, or even of the plans of this very event. Your hands-off approach instilled in me exactly the confidence necessary to come into your school ready and able to meet the specific needs of your students. Bravo!

To your assistant principal: who, despite the above attempts at communication, was shocked to find me in one of your classrooms on my assigned day, and who, after my lovely conversation with the three burly security guards she called—and you should feel safe knowing such strong and conscientious men, with such pliable, firm, yet often gentle hands, are looking after your protection—asked that I immediately provide her with full lesson plans following EATM, COSEE, and NYSBOE guidelines, for each residency day. Huzzah!

To your teachers: who, sensitive to the challenges of teaching 29 seventh graders per class, knew instinctively the best way to support our partnership was to spend the 40-minute period texting, chatting with other teachers in the hall, or simply leaving the room for vast swaths of time with neither warning nor explanation, so that I could most effectively implement my pedagogy. L’chaim!

To your parents: who had the good sense to supply you not with pencils and paper for your day at school, but something far more necessary: a cell-phone/PSP/boom box. Without this, we all know how difficult it would have been for you to achieve the momentous work captured in these pages. Chin chin!

To my own administrators: ever vigilant, who assigned me a residency so well-served by our city’s public transportation network: a mere four trains, two buses, and 20-minute walk was all that was necessary to arrive each day at 8:00am for first period—only two-hours each way—for the pleasure of working with you. Skoal!

And of course, finally, to you, my students: in this difficult time for you, your body’s crazy new chemistry filling you with an aggression that, though you worked your hardest to suppress it, often found its outlet in threats to my person: without your hard work, this book, culled as it is from your occasional scribbles would not exist.

So, before the sugar kicks in and you, as every class before you has, destroy the gorgeous anthologies to which I devoted countless weeknight and weekend hours that I could have been enriching friendships, catching up on my own writing, or drowning my sorrows at the local tavern: to you and what you…accomplished…here today!

Cheers!

-David Andrew Stoler is a screenwriter, fiction, and nonfiction writer.  You can read more about David here.